Maud Hixson singing and entertaining the audience before the Dec. 2 showing of “White Christmas.” (Davis Steen)
During the holiday season, debates are sparked around movies and music. Which is the best Christmas movie? Does “Die Hard” count as one? Is Mariah Carey’s album the last good Christmas album to come out?
But some movies stand the test of time. “White Christmas,” starring Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney is one of them.
“I first saw this movie on a little black-and-white TV when I was a teenager and I loved it,” Maud Hixson said. “To see it on the big screen absolutely brings me back.”
The Heights Theater, 3951 Central Ave. NE in Columbia Heights, screens the 1954 holiday classic “White Christmas” every year. Every year it sells out. This year was one of the fastest yet.
“We sold out before the event started,” said Tom Letness, owner and restorer of The Heights Theater. At Monday, Dec. 2’s showing, he was behind the concession stand doling out popcorn to the festively-dressed crowd. “We started selling tickets in July.”
The Heights Theater showed the movie 13 times this year, with 248 tickets sold per event. That’s a grand total of 3,224 people coming to this one-screen theater over the course of a week and a half.
From beer to movies
Gottlieb Gluek brought his brewing skills from Germany and established his brewery in 1857. The brewery is one year older than the state of Minnesota.
Cut to 1926 and we have Arthur Gluek, one Gottlieb’s heirs, constructing The Heights Theater as a real estate venture while Prohibition was enacted. The theater started as a “movie house” that also put on stage plays and “high-class amateur vaudeville acts.”
Between 1926 and 1998, it went through many iterations, due to three fires, a bombing and a heavy windstorm, known colloquially as “The Big Blow of 1949,” which twisted the sign out front. The space was a discount theater for much of the ’70s and ’80s. Letness and a partner purchased the theater in 1998.
“I remember you had to be careful which seat you chose,” Terry Steen said. “Some of the seats were so dilapidated, you didn’t want to sit in those.” He attended movies at The Heights in the ’70s.
Hixson also recalled the times she attended movies during the discount years in the ’80s.“It wasn’t looking very special,” Hixson said. “Tom bought it and restored it to what it was like before.”
Tom Letness, left, working the popcorn machine while Noah Nelson and Olivia Fredrickson await the next order. (Davis Steen)
Heights today
Letness has restored the theater back to its pre-discount theater years. He used the original blueprints, which were stored at the University of Minnesota, as a guide. This includes chandeliers that hang from the ceiling above the audience.
The Heights doesn’t just play new movies; selections tend to span a few decades. December alone has a 2024 movie, “Conclave,” and the oldest movie playing is from 1929, “Big Business” by the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.
The theater is one of the few left that can still play 35 and 70mm film. Because of that, visitors get a chance to see movies that can’t be shown by new digital projectors.
Before shows on Friday and Saturdays, an organ player entertains the audience while they wait for their movie to start. The organ also plays before special showings, which it did on Dec. 2. Lou Hurvitz played “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” the organ installed in the theater that is on a lift from the old orchestra pit. It dates back to the 1920s, when WCCO Radio had it in its studio.
“White Christmas” is more involved than your usual moviegoing experience
The difference between most movies shown at the theater and “White Christmas,” is the transportation back to a time when movies were a spectacle that took the whole evening.
After the organ was lowered and Hurvitz took a bow, the lights went down.That’s when Hixson and Rick Carlson took the stage.
Hixson and Carlson are a married couple who play music and sing songs before the showing of “White Christmas,” with Hixson singing and Carlson playing the piano. They performed a variety of songs, some very well-known, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and some less popular, such as “I like Snow” by Patty McGovern.
“I was asked by Tom to do the show,” Hixson said. “He had Bing Crosby’s widow, Kathryn, do the show in previous years.” Kathryn Crosby, who often went by her stage name Kathryn Grant, would perform with Carlson before Hixson took over.
“She would do a show which had been written with Bob Hope’s widow,” Hixson said. “She had this lovely show put together.”
When Hixson takes the stage, it isn’t just a few songs from Christmases past followed by the movie. It’s a Great American Songbook-fueled storytelling show that asks for a little more participation than people are used to in a movie theater.
In between songs, Hixson entertains the audience with stories of where the song came from, who sang or wrote it or which movie it was in. With “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” Hixson told the story of Minnesota native Judy Garland, and how the song was written for her in the movie “Meet me in St. Louis.”
“People like when I give the context of the song,” Hixson said. “I always want to know the biography of the song, why the song exists.”
Conversational, but not a crooner
The concert itself reckons to a time of the jazz voices in the ’30s and ’40s. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, singers sometimes referred to as “crooners,” would entertain audiences while filling in with anecdotes about the song, their lives or, in Dean Martin’s case, a roast of his guests.
“Microphones have gotten better, but singers used to have to belt for everyone to hear it,” Hixson said. Singers could be more conversational with the better technology; thus the term “crooner” was born. “The ‘crooner’ term came back in the ’40s when Sinatra came along and was embracing his microphone like a lover,” Hixson added.
“Croon” means to sing or speak in a gentle murmuring manner. Most singers hated the mostly masculine term. Bing Crosby made a short movie called “Learn to Croon” in 1933, making fun of the term and the label given to him.
Lou Hurvitz bows to the audience after finishing a song on “The Mighty Wurlitzer.” (Davis Steen)
December, 2024 (Oh, what a night)
Theatergoers listened to Hixson and Carlson perform the songs of the seasons from years past, but they were asked to join in at the end. A short clip from a 1949 movie called “Snow Foolin’” has a cartoon chicken ask the viewers to follow the bouncing egg. The egg leads them through the lyrics to “Jingle Bells,” including a few verses that don’t get sung very often.
Hixson thanked the audience and she and Carlson left as the movie started. The audience settled down from the sing-along to enjoy the two-hour film about a couple of World War II soldier and friends who help their former general and his hotel survive the surprisingly-snowless winter in Vermont. All while tap-dancing, singing and telling jokes.
The holiday season kicks off for the audience with this event. Many return year after year to see the show and how it changes as the years go on.
“We’ve been doing it for about 17 years,” Hixson said. “It has evolved as I have evolved. I used to have to guess what people might enjoy.”